A new semester approaches! Here’s what I’m offering the good people of Rutgers. English 358:358 Early Twentieth-Century Fiction Fall 2025, Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:00–3:20 p.m., in Murray 213 Co-taught with Cassandra Schifman Course page This course tells two stories about the revolutionary period in twentieth-century literature in English beginning around 1890 and running to the start of the Second World War in 1945. The first story is the story of the modernist breakthrough, when rad...| Andrew Goldstone
“No Kings” was huge in New York, even bigger than “Hands Off” was, and the national turnout was likewise gigantic, not only in the flashpoint cities like LA and NYC but all over the map. In NYC I didn’t hear any speakers. Nationally, there was no single leading organization, though Indivisible is among the prime movers, with the ACLU and labor unions—including mine—getting on the bandwagon and swelling the numbers. What does this rallying crowd want? It seems clear enough that m...| Andrew Goldstone
Following the example of Chris Newfield, who has returned to the unversity-finances-blogging fray after a hiatus, I went and looked at Rutgers’s potential losses from the initial onslaught from the current federal government. The New York Times analysis of NIH grants has the following numbers for Rutgers’s four schools (figures in thousands of dollars): CampusGrantsLoss RBHS181,000-30,000 RU–New Brunswick57,000-11,000 RU–Newark9,000-2,000 RU–Camden1,000-173 The NYT writers note that...| Andrew Goldstone
Rutgers students are about to enroll in spring 2025 courses—here are descriptions of mine. (Batteries not included. Images enlarged to show texture. Paid for by the Committee to Read Some Good Books in Class.) Edited, January 23, 2025: added links to the coursewebpages, fresh off the presses. Ursula K. Le Guin: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Literature English 358:437, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00–3:20 in HC-E128 Syllabus etc. Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the most important science-fiction and...| Andrew Goldstone
I celebrate the labor movement on May 1 and syllabuses on the first Monday in September. This semester I volunteered to teach in Rutgers’s revamped first-year writing course, College Writing (the Course Formerly Known As Expos). My last first-year writing course was a while ago, when we still used styluses and clay tablets, but I think I am ready to meet the younger generation where they are and make the leap forward to quill pens. The course-wide syllabus gives a sense of the revamped focu...| Andrew Goldstone
I’m presenting at this year’s conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing at the University of Reading. My talk is a first stab at a British-focused counterpart to my work on US genre fiction’s origins: Yank Mags and Mushrooms: Genre Fiction in mid-century Britain Tuesday, July 2, 11:00 a.m. in Palmer 1.05 When did popular fiction become genre fiction? Despite the proliferation of formulaic fictions in Britain from the 1890s onwards, the self-conscious ...| Andrew Goldstone
We’re in the midst of a busy month for the sociology of literature at Rutgers English. Usually the only person busy with the soc. of lit. is yours truly, but last week we welcomed a credentialed literary sociologist, Karl Berglund (Uppsala), in a double-header with Justin Tackett (Utah State) at the Initiative for the Book. Justin presented on “Clipped Reading” and the history of the intertitle; Kalle presented some of the findings from his terrific new book on audio readers—including...| Andrew Goldstone
It’s syllabus time again—what’s that you say? the semester has already started?—well I guess I’d better put something on the internet to show I have some idea what I’m going to be doing in class. I am teaching a graduate seminar this term: Twentieth-Century Genre: The Case of the Detective. Through some unaccountable oversight I have been allowed to teach a course designated “theory,” which means all students will be required to rewrite Aristotle’s Poetics as if it were abou...| Andrew Goldstone
I have a review essay out in the new issue of American Literary History, under the title “Genre Fiction without Shame.” It’s a longish discussion of Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less and Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher’s Genre Worlds, ornamented with my Strong Opinions™ about the study of popular genre. The journal permits authors to share an initially submitted version. Bonus features of the latter include a few embarrassing imprecisions in quotation and a far super...| Andrew Goldstone
This past Tuesday, at the kind invitation of Wen Xin, I gave a talk at the University of Kansas, under the title “Data Is a Sandwich: Lessons from the Computational Literary Field.” My slides (PDF) might only be of use for pictures of the titular sandwich, but they do also contain R code for reproducing my figures demonstrating some of the lessons I taught out of my dataculture package of cultural data in last year’s Data and Culture course. The talk itself was a bit of a retrospective ...| Andrew Goldstone
I honor Labor Day the way Karl Marx intended, by finishing up my syllabuses. Since it’s September, it must be Early Twentieth-Century Fiction time. I am also teaching Introduction to Science Fiction for the first time. Will there be Star Trek? Of course there will be Star Trek. The links go to pages with abbreviated schedules, but the full syllabuses are available in PDF: Early 20th-c. and SF. The two syllabus formats are not automatically generated from the same source, because getting tha...| Andrew Goldstone
Manual pin: My article, “Origins of the US Genre-Fiction System, 1890–1856,” is just out in Book History. Read all about it. I made an R package with some “cultural” datasets of various kinds that might be of pedagogical use. It is available on github as agoldst/dataculture. See the repository page for a summary of the datasets, which I used to teach introductory analyses of: cultural tastes over time and social space (names, music genres, recipes) textual/paratextual signs of ficti...| Andrew Goldstone
As a kind of closing ritual for the past semester, I made webpages for my spring 2023 courses. I put enough work into these two courses that it felt good to collect slides/notes and handouts, breaking them free from the prison of Canvas: Principles of Literary Study, Spring 2023 Introduction to Crime Fiction, Spring 2023 Also I wanted to supply the pedagogical context for two quixotic annotation projects I pursued this term: on Shahid’s Call Me Ishmael Tonight and Ngũgĩ’s Petals of Bloo...| Andrew Goldstone
This past semester I spent a good chunk of my Introduction to Crime Fiction course on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1977 novel Petals of Blood. I wanted my students to spend time with a text where the guilty culprit really was capitalism. By happy coincidence we reached the end of the novel, with its heroic but tantalizingly inconclusive brewery strike, just as the Rutgers faculty/grad unions went on strike. That helped add an experiential dimension to my students’ encounter with a 46-year-old ...| Andrew Goldstone
I have an article out in the new issue of Book History, modestly titled “Origins of the US Genre-Fiction System, 1890–1956.” By kind permission of the publisher I can also share the accepted manuscript version, which is both open access and richer in typographical errors. Publishers’ Weekly, January 25, 1941: 429. This is the first published piece of my current book project on the history of genre fiction. In the article I attempt to trace the formation of an institutionalized system ...| Andrew Goldstone
Here are some annotations to selected references in Agha Shahid Ali’s Call Me Ishmael Tonight, together with some information about the poet. These are for my students in Principles of Literary Study this semester, who are reading the book this week. But perhaps it will be of some use for other readers of this remarkable poet. The poet is sometimes referred to by his last name Ali and sometimes by his pen-name Shahid—which is also what his friends called him. I’ve chosen “Shahid.” Y...| Andrew Goldstone
I updated my teaching page with descriptions of my spring 2023 courses and the preliminary syllabuses. I’m teaching Principles of Literary Study and Introduction to Crime Fiction. I’m once again treating Principles as a grab-bag, splitting the semester into seven weeks on poetry and seven weeks on narrative. For the final project, students will rewrite one of the novels we read as an epic poem in hexameters, blank verse, or ślokas. Undergrad crime is a new course for me, though I have ta...| Andrew Goldstone
…Well, on YouTube: with my comrades on our union’s University Budget and Priorities Committee, I was on a panel about following the money at Rutgers, which you can see a recording of here. I talked a bit about the erosion of tenure and the rise of full-time non-tenure-track faculty positions. It’s a subject I have blogged on more than once before; those earlier posts give more detail about the data and analysis I used. Then I indulged in a little speculation and imagined—in the mode o...| Andrew Goldstone
I have two undergraduate courses this fall. I thought I’d post the syllabuses and also give away my hidden agenda. English 358:358 Early Twentieth-Century Fiction Syllabus (pdf) What do James Joyce, Dashiell Hammett, Mulk Raj Anand, and Zora Neale Hurston have in common? All significant writers of English-language fiction, all active in the first half of the twentieth century, these writers lived through an epoch of global social upheaval—world wars, revolutions, mass migrations, the rise...| Andrew Goldstone
The other day I was talking with an innocent bystander about some of my past work in the digital humanities. It occurred to me to wonder what a person who went looking for that work would find. The abyss also looks into you. Anyhoo, once upon a time I spent a lot of time working with data from JSTOR’s Data for Research service, a thing that no longer exists, and I produced two fairly elaborate programming projects related to topic models of text: my dfrtopics R package and my dfr-browser to...| Andrew Goldstone
In my last post on casualization at Rutgers, written November 2021, I discussed statistics on the rise of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty, arguing that this was an increasingly significant yet under-discussed aspect of the broader erosion of the tenure track. I promised then that I’d follow up on some of the details about different categories of faculty and of institutions. Would my dire picture of “twilight for tenure” change if I separated non-medical from medical faculty, or if I...| Andrew Goldstone
Yesterday I had the privilege of responding to a wonderful talk by Matt Rubery at the Rutgers Initiative for the Book on “Podcasts, Audiobooks, and Podiobooks.” Feeling out of my depth as a non-podcast-listener, I went to my happy place instead, using my response as an occasion for digging around in a period and a medium I know better. Thinking about entanglements of print and audio fiction, I was moved to learn a little bit more about… (Image from Galactic Central.) I’m not sure brin...| Andrew Goldstone
I caught wind of some of the examples of GPT-3 answering PhD-exam-style questions plausibly. It seems to me an elegant if indirect proof that Wikipedia entries on many topics are written by current or former graduate students, or people with an excellent ability to imitate them. But it also called to mind the famous arithmetic scene in Eugène Ionesco’s La leçon, which I am sure I am not the first to think of in connection with today’s debates over “stochastic parrots.” The pupil has...| Andrew Goldstone
Violating my resolution to never click through to NYT higher education coverage, I went and read a report on the scandal over Columbia’s US News rankings. That rankings are “reactive” is not exactly breaking news (see Espeland and Sauder and Fourcade), but the article is worth it for two reasons. The first is the line in my title, which describes Michael Thaddeus, the Columbia math professor whose analysis is the basis for the story. The second reason is the link to the analysis itself,...| Andrew Goldstone
My courses for Fall 2025| Andrew Goldstone
It’s been a while since I checked in on the statistics for what is| Andrew Goldstone